What People Are Saying About Bennington’s President

Janet Napolitano

US Secretary of Homeland Security

“Whether balancing the needs of diverse communities, championing projects that serve both public and private needs, or understanding the role that education, science, and technology play in economic development, Mariko Silver has the ability to develop and advance big ideas.”

Michael Crow

President, Arizona State University

“Mariko’s ability to build programs and projects in collaboration with faculty, university leadership, and diverse community stakeholders is extraordinary. Both Bennington and ASU, while obviously of different institutional scale, place extraordinary value on innovative institutional architecture, push pedagogical boundaries in service of the best educational experience for students, and pursue the best teaching and thought leadership outcomes to improve the global trajectory. Strategic, visionary, collaborative, Mariko is an innovative thinker steeped in the challenges and opportunities for organizational change in higher education and an outstanding choice to lead Bennington into the future.”

Rocco Landesman

Former Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts

“Mariko is incredibly focused on what needs to get done and she understands deeply the importance of creativity in problem solving; she also understands fundamentally the importance of creativity for its own sake. With her father a filmmaker and her mother a distinguished arts philanthropist, she’s been steeped in the intersections of arts and culture since birth. It’s a killer combination; the brains of a scientist and the soul of an artist.”

Gloria Steinem

Author, journalist, and activist

“When Mariko told me that she was going to become Bennington’s new president, I thought, ‘good for them.’ She’ll be a fantastic role model for young women, and for young men. She’s smart, she’s bold, she’s focused, and the fact that she’s a new mom shows this generation of college students that the tired dichotomization of work and life is finally beginning to fade.”

Catharine R. Stimpson

Professor and Dean Emerita, New York University

“Higher education will be applauding—if not envying—Bennington’s imagination and wisdom in its choice of its new president. Mariko Silver will greet a volatile future with foresight, resilience, energy—and the deepest respect for the great virtues of a community of scholarship, teaching, learning, and creativity.”

Alan Kornberg ’74

Chairman, Bennington College Board of Trustees

“Mariko Silver embodies a new model for the American college president—someone who sees the world not as a set of givens but as a collection of resources to be harnessed. She has an extraordinary intellectual and imaginative vitality, an outstanding track record, and a deep commitment to the College’s pedagogic traditions and values. Dr. Silver’s appointment also signals Bennington’s ambitions to expand the influence of the College’s founding ideals and contemporary practices in a world that is rapidly changing, that is simultaneously fragmented and interconnected, and that is, in every dimension, increasingly complex and global.”